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Sound Beat
Monday - Friday at 11:30 a.m.

Got 90 seconds? Then you’ve got time for a trip through the history of recorded sound! Sound Beat is a daily, 90-second show highlighting the holdings of the Belfer Audio Laboratory and Archive. Belfer is part of Syracuse University Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center and is one of the largest sound archives in the United States. Each Sound Beat episode focuses on one particular recording from the Archive and provides a back story detailing its place in recording history.

What kinds of recordings? Popular and classical music performances, film scores those from distinctly American musical forms like jazz, bebop, country, and bluegrass. Old favorites, rare gems, and some that you’ve never heard before… from Cab Calloway to the castrated stars of Italian opera, you’ll hear it all on the Sound Beat!

And it’s not just music. Sound Beat episodes also feature speeches and spoken word performances from some of the great thinkers, political figures and luminaries from the late 19th and early- to mid-20th centuries — people like Thomas Edison, George Bernard Shaw, Amelia Earhart, Albert Einstein, and Theodore Roosevelt.